You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
I find something so very true and real about this saying. Kafka wrote it as part of a collection of 109 numbered observations written bewteen October 1917 and April 1918. while he was convalescing from tuberculosis at his sister Ottla's home in the small village of Zürau (now Siřem in the Czech Republic). Kafka was thirty-four, had received his terminal diagnosis, and had left his job at the Prague insurance office for eight months in the countryside. The aphorisms were published posthumously by Max Brod in 1931. Roberto Calasso's more recent English edition, translated by Michael Hofmann, appeared in 2006 as The Zürau Aphorisms (Schocken Books).
